Culture matters for teachers’ emotion regulation and its relations to their well-being: A three-level meta-analytic review

Teachers’ emotion regulation may serve either as a personal resource that enhances their well-being or as a personal demand that impairs it. A meta-analytic review is necessary and timely to explore the relationships between teachers’ emotion regulation and their well-being across multiple samples. Emotion regulation is culture-specific and context-sensitive. However, few educational studies have provided robust empirical examinations of the roles of sociocultural contexts in shaping teachers’ emotion regulation, resulting in a limited understanding of how cultural factors influence teachers’ emotional processes. Therefore, in this meta-analysis, the moderating effects of both contextual and individual variables were examined to reveal how national culture, school organizational contexts, and individual characteristics impact the relationships between teachers’ emotion regulation and their well-being. This study adopted three-level random-effects models to mitigate false positives and better accommodate distinct samples. The results showed that cognitive reappraisal, automatic emotion regulation, and general emotion regulation were positively associated with teachers’ well-being, while expressive suppression was negatively associated with it. In addition, the theoretical framework, region, national culture, subject, and gender significantly or marginally significantly moderated these relationships in different ways, while the level of education did not. These findings shed light on how cultural, organizational, and personal factors are associated with teachers’ emotion regulation and its relations to well-being, and provide insights into examining teacher emotion from a cultural perspective. The implications of these findings are discussed, and recommendations for educational practice and future research are proposed. • Cognitive reappraisal, automatic emotion regulation, and general emotion regulation are positively associated with teachers’ well-being • Expressive suppression is negatively associated with teachers’ well-being • Automatic emotion regulation shows the strongest positive association with teachers’ well-being • The theoretical framework of emotion regulation adopts a more positive perspective than that of emotional labor • Cultural dimensions moderate the associations between teachers’ emotion regulation and their well-being